


don't try to tame me, you'll eat my dust

by fourshoesfrank



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Autistic Doctor (Doctor Who), Gen, Pete's World (Doctor Who), i love nine so much okay, look at the title. blame ozzy osbourne for this not me
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-09
Updated: 2021-03-09
Packaged: 2021-03-15 12:49:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,070
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29933682
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fourshoesfrank/pseuds/fourshoesfrank
Summary: "But he died! I saw him regenerate into you!""Yeah, well... I guess the universe couldn't have two of me running around. Might create a paradox, you know.""He's dead, though!""And now he's back! Don't worry, he'll remember everything. Probably. New software on old hardware, who knows what'll happen?"AU where the metacrisis Doctor is Nine, because reasons
Relationships: Metacrisis Tenth Doctor & Rose Tyler, Ninth Doctor & Rose Tyler, Tenth Doctor & Rose Tyler
Kudos: 5





	don't try to tame me, you'll eat my dust

**Author's Note:**

> title from the song Never Know Why by Ozzy Osbourne. "don't you dare make this place domestic"

"There we go, then! Reality Bomb's been taken care of, twenty-seven planets back in their rightful place, and—I'd say—everyone came out relatively unharmed. So! Great work, everyone, and happy... what day is it?"

"Wednesday," Mickey pipes up. The Doctor thanks him (to Mickey's surprise) and continues on with what Rose likes to think of as the 'closing remarks'. Sounds very posh, closing remarks, like something you'd hear at a party after the host has gone to bed and everyone else is in for a massive headache in the morning. Well, the Doctor may insist that Time Lords don't sleep, but they certainly do leave swathes of headaches in their wake. 

Of course, it's a good sign that those heads manage to stay attached,  Rose muses to herself. The Doctor's still talking. Well, the suited, spiky-haired and bespectacled Doctor is talking. The other Doctor, with the leather jacket and buzzed hair (the new arrival, the older model), hasn't said much. Rose hasn't said much to him, either. She's not sure what to say, or if there is anything to  be said at all. Nobody's even told her why he's here. He's dead. 

"Rose?"

She snaps herself out of it. "Yeah?"

The Doctor with the suit and glasses gestures back at the TARDIS. "Come on, let's go."

Rose follows him into the blue box, and her mum follows her, and the Doctor with the leather jacket sort of manages to drift inside before the doors close on their own. The TARDIS takes them back to Bad Wolf Bay, back to the world the Doctor named after her father, and before she knows it, Rose is saying goodbye to the Doctor again. 

He grasps her by the shoulders and tells her this isn't goodbye. Because of the metacrisis. Rose doesn't fully understand the situation because, like the Doctor keeps saying, there's never been a human/Time Lord metacrisis before. Part of her wishes that this one never happened in the first place. 

The basics are clear, though. Two Doctors, two parallel worlds, and only one Rose Tyler. The spiky-haired Doctor talks about second chances and growing old together while the Doctor with the buzzed hair just stands there, saying nothing. Rose is going to cry. 

"But he  _died!"_ she hears herself exclaiming. "I saw him regenerate into you!" 

_ Sort of a way of cheating death .  _

The Doctor clears his throat. "Yeah, well... I guess the universe couldn't have two of me running around. Might create a paradox, you know." Rose does know, and that's the worst part. She's read up on temporal physics and quantum physics and paradoxes until it felt like her brain would burst (or burn) from all the knowledge, so she  does understand most of the science of why there's two Doctors now. The science can't explain it all, though. Rose doesn't think anything can. 

"He's dead, though!"  He's dead, I watched him die and turn into you, he's  dead can't you remember he's dead—

"And now he's back! Don't worry, he'll remember everything. Probably. New software on old hardware, who knows what'll happen?" 

-

Lots of weird, Time-Lord-y mental illness, that's what'll happen. New software on old hardware, yeah right. More like several years' worth of new memories crammed into a mind that technically didn't experience them. Or maybe did experience them, but not in the same body. It's weird, and Rose doesn't understand it because nobody will explain it to her. The only one who could maybe-kinda-sorta explain it to her hasn't said a word in weeks. 

The Doctor has nightmares about the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 CE and being possessed by a living sun (???) (Rose hasn't asked about it yet) and being born again in a flaming TARDIS. 

Fire. The Doctor has nightmares about fire, and Rose knows it, even if it takes weeks for him to admit it to her. During those weeks, he hardly says anything at all. He flinches at the stove and steers clear of the scented candles that Rose's mum likes. He doesn't say anything, though. Doesn't ask her to cook someplace else or buy one of those aerosol cans of Frebreeze (it's called something else in Pete's World, but the point stands). 

It's scary. Rose looks at him, and she hears him saying, "I'm the Doctor, and if there's one thing I can do, it's talk." The memory echoes round and round in her brain, with no new words from him to stop it. So instead, Rose talks to him. At first it's just... inane little stories, anecdotes or interesting things that happened at work, or just talking about what was on the news the other day. Sometimes, a particular detail will catch his attention and his eyebrows raise and a little more clarity comes into his eyes, but that's rare. Mostly he just happens to be in the same room while Rose talks to the air. 

-

Little by little, the Doctor begins to talk back—not in the rude sense. He starts responding to Rose's chatter. A "Really?" here, a "Mm" there, peppered with a few little "Hmm" sounds. Rose does her best not to freak out. Turns out, her best isn't very good, because when he cuts into a story about an hour-long fire drill at her elementary school with a sarcastically muttered, "Fantastic," Rose bursts into tears. 

She never really understood why the expression was 'burst into tears,' because... nothing seemed to do any actual bursting. She definitely understands now. 

It's like a pipe has burst in her brain, like a pressurized stream of anticipation and worry and concern and love has finally managed to get past a blockage made of composure and patience. It's such a relief to hear the Doctor's voice again, because all those little sounds definitely don't count as  _his._ Those are just things that any random person could say. The word fantastic belongs to the Doctor,  _her_ Doctor, and as far as Rose is concerned, it's the first word he's said in this parallel universe. 

"Fantastic," she echoes shakily, because she doesn't trust herself to say much of anything without crying even harder. It shouldn't even be possible to cry harder than she already is, but hey—nothings impossible with the Doctor. And this human is the Doctor,  her Doctor, even if she doesn't fully understand why she's been given a second chance with him. She's going to take it. 

**Author's Note:**

> if you comment or kudos i will literally kiss you on the lips


End file.
